I had such high hopes for the Christmas holidays. Friends and family were all heading back to Whitstable to drink far too much mulled wine, eat far too many mulled oysters, and talk about how awful 2016 had been. My Christmas shopping was all taken care of courtesy of Amazon, and I was only very slightly annoyed when my mum revealed on Christmas day that we were actually doing secret santa. The larder was stocked with booze, the garden ready for 4 nights of bonfires (a Worth family tradition), and as always my dad had bought far too large a turkey for a family of whom half are vegetarians.

The turkey after Christmas lunch. No wonder it’s refusing to speak to us.

But aside from all the Christmas stuff, I was really excited to start writing. Properly writing. Over the Autumn term all my time had been taken up with preparing lectures and seminars, giving tutorials, marking essays – you know, the things I’m paid to do. What I hadn’t managed to find time for were the things I have to do for my career which aren’t actually part of my job. Top of the list: get published.

I’ve finished my PhD, I’ve passed my viva, I’ve even got some hourly-paid lecturing work alongside working for the writing centre. Yet in academia most of that means very little if you haven’t published. This was why I was so excited for the Christmas holidays: two whole weeks to sit around in hipster cafes with a macbook, a notebook and a tiny espresso and just write.

According to my stock image search, this is what constitutes all writing.

Unfortunately the article simply wouldn’t come. I don’t know what went wrong. I had a plan, I had a thesis statement, I had all my research and sources neatly mapped out. I even had a couple of chapters from my thesis to base the article on! But I just couldn’t get the words onto the screen. Perhaps my coffee wasn’t artisan enough? My notebook was Moleskine, so no problem there. Admittedly I was using a PC rather than a Mac, but I’ve heard tell of people writing entire books on PCs. No, I think the problem lay beyond the realms of stock image definitions of writing.

My real problem was knowing how to start, and like all fools I was trying to start at the beginning. I wanted some kind of pithy anecdote or quotation, something which neatly summarizes my argument through the little story of some unknown person’s curious actions 250 years ago. Of course, I had no such story. Instead, I was staring at the screen hoping that the anecdote would somehow be magically bestowed upon me from on high.

What I should have done (and what I am going to do now) is start in the middle. I know exactly which topics I’m going to talk about in the main body of the article, so I’m going to leap straight into those whilst blissfully ignoring the shrieking protests of the as-yet-to-be-written introduction. Once the main body of the article is starting to take shape, I get the feeling the introduction will come to me. Even if it doesn’t, at least I’ll be sitting staring at a half-finished article rather than a blank screen.

So if you, like me, often struggle to start writing I suggest starting in the middle. It also works really well for a 10K race, but keep it under your hat.